Taylor made for management

Life and times: Graham Taylor bows out of football still standing

By Sue Mott

7:46PM BST 04 May 2001

WHEN a football manager retires you are sometimes tempted to drive a stake through his heart just to make sure he stays gone. The exception to that rule says goodbye tomorrow: to a Watford throng that adores him, to an England past that almost destroyed him, to 28 managerial years of peak and trough, ecstasy and pain, acclaim and disgusting ridicule. He survived it all. It explains his favourite Sir Elton song: I'm Still Standing.

Graham Taylor remembers the headline in the local paper when he was asked to resign by the son of the millionaire chairman at Wolves. "He will never work in this country again!" It was an ignorant slur but it worked in mysterious ways. He thought: "Sod it! I'll choose when I go, not you," and it brought him here, now, to a windy corner of Vicarage Road, where he is scanning a stadium he virtually built with his own hands.

He has chosen the time of his going himself and you could not wish that fate on a finer, more decent, more honourable man.

"See that stand there," he is pointing through a swirling mist of low cloud (very special effects) at a small bank of red seating at the far end of the ground, "that was the first family enclosure. I ran the marathon in 1983 to help raise £34,000 for that. That kind of thing would be laughed at now.

Related Articles

"Perhaps what I have always lacked is the utter ruthlessness to stay at the top. But I don't mind that. I only have to think of the reception I've been given lately to think, 'Fine, that'll do me. I must have done something right'."

Aston Villa gave him a standing ovation last year, Gillingham gave him a presentation last week, and Watford, as you might expect of the club he steered from shanty town to Shangri-La, are virtually prostrate with grief and thanks.

So while a tabloid press, rabid for his blood, were sinking to shameful depths of abuse in the twilight of his reign as England manager, there would be a postscript to the story. History has reworked him. And he emerges now, at 56, an undamaged, non-cynical human being who reckons he might take up line dancing and is determined to walk the Grand Union Canal. These simple things of life have been denied him for too long.

"When you're passionate and enthusiastic about football, you live it, dream it, breathe it, all the time. The downside is that you never have it out of your mind. Well, now I feel the time is right to make some space in my mind for other things.

"I don't want to stay on to become bitter. I think there's a prospect for that because of the way the game is changing. The last five years, I've worked my socks off. Worked really hard. But it's taken its toll a little bit. There's so much money in the game. I'm not in any way criticising a good set of lads at Watford but the money has created a band of players - and some of Watford's players are in this band - who are earning more money than they have ever earned in their life and yet they know they're not good enough for the top. Now, unless those players are self-motivators, they are harder and harder to manage.

"So when you see Porsches and BMWs in the car park and the wives driving four-wheelers, what do you do? Throw money at players who just come and use Watford or do you instead put your money into the academy, improve facilities, fight and work away? We chose to do that. But it's hard work."

This is one of the reasons why Taylor has a "gut feeling" that it's time to go. He has wavered only once, when he offered eight lads from the academy professional contracts. "To see the innocence and joy in them, and the lack of cynicism. I thought, `Graham, you would love to stay on and help these boys develop into professional footballers'. It was a moment of weakness."

You can see clearly that Taylor was never vampiric or brutal enough for the downside of football. As a young Grimsby left-back - "a thin lad with the squarest shoulders you could imagine" - he doubled up as a seller of `Kiss Me Quick' hats and other paraphernalia on the prom at Cleethorpes during the summer. You can't see Ryan Giggs doing the same in Rhyl.

It was a handy education. Grammar school in Scunthorpe that left him versed in the three Rs. "But it had prepared me for life in no way whatsoever. I didn't swear. I didn't do anything." He had been destined to be head boy, now he was a boot boy. "I learned quick." But not quite quickly enough in all cases.

He bought his first car from a fellow Grimsby Town player who assured him one can of petrol would last ages. But it didn't and Taylor was not bashful in assailing the seller of the vehicle. An inspection took place. "How long have you had the choke out?" Taylor was asked. "About two weeks," he replied.

It is a remarkable tribute to the man that such innocence was followed by a manifest grasp of managerial complexities. He was a motivator, administrator and foster father. His greatest pride lies in bringing players on. John Barnes is always quoted as his most famous son but many others have been inspired by his care: Dwight Yorke, Tim Sherwood, David James, David Platt, Paul McGrath.

But back in time, in 1977, future successes were unknown and unknowable as a little Fourth Division outfit called Watford with a pop star chairman in glittery boots enticed him from Lincoln. It was not a pretty sight, the ground (not Elton John). One end featured an unterraced mound of rubbish. The Shrodells Stand was a small monument to rust and dilapidation. The terracing under the Rookery Stand was so shallow that all but the front row saw nothing (often a plus).

"What do you expect of me?" Taylor asked his new boss, expecting a vague wish for promotion. "I want to get into Europe," said Elton promptly. He wondered how much it would cost him. Taylor guessed about a million. "OK," said Elton. In the end, they did it for £500,000.

It is incredible. Taylor looks back at those first seven years at Watford in a state of proud disbelief. They roared through the divisions, arrived in the top flight, finished runners-up to Liverpool for the Championship, reached the 1984 FA Cup final, beat Kaiserslautern 3-0 in the UEFA Cup despite missing seven first-team players and lived the fairytale before anyone had heard of the headbangers of Wimbledon.

"We beat Manchester United when we were still in Division Three. We beat Sunderland 8-0. We beat Tottenham 5-1. Then we went to Forest and lost 7-3 but it was such a great game that Cloughie came into our dressing room afterwards, gave me a big kiss and said we were all fantastic.

"I can remember all these things because I've been so close to it," he said wistfully. He seems to remember every game they played, each one part of the jigsaw of a miracle.

He went to Aston Villa in 1987 because he burned with ambition to be England manager. "I made no bones about it. I wasn't embarrassed or ashamed in any way." Even so, loyal by nature, the wrench leaving Watford affected him. Doug Ellis, the Villa chairman, made him a guest in his own home for his first night as Villa manager and Taylor was too traumatised to sleep. Earlier, he had sat outside the house in his car thinking: "I'll just knock on the door and tell him I've made a mistake." It was almost comical. But he eventually shook off the sense of dislocation and Villa finished runners-up to Liverpool in the Championship.

Then in 1990, just as Gazza had stopped crying and the nation had begun to believe in the England football team as a force, he achieved his ultimate goal, he was manager of England. He would rule and conquer. Nothing in his life had prepared him for failure.

His downfall was almost Shakespearean, born of in-built flaws and out-going superstars. Peter Shilton and Terry Butcher had retired. Bryan Robson would go six months later. Gascoigne tended not to be entirely reliable. "And, anyway," said Taylor, "people imagine it was three and a half years of unmitigated disaster. It wasn't. We lost one game out of the first 21 and that was against the world champions, Germany."

The descent started when he lost infamously to Sweden in the 1992 European Championship finals, substituting Gary Lineker, which was tantamount to shooting the Queen Mother. The slavering maw of the gutter press opened to receive him. "All that crap!" Taylor says succinctly now. When he failed to qualify for the World Cup, saying the f-word 27 times on a TV documentary that he was too honest or too naive to edit, the knives plunged in. He was diced vegetable.

Wolves picked him up, then threw him off. It was, he now admits, the lowest point of his life. The phone rang. Watford, of course. "No," he said and took Rita, his wife, to watch England play cricket in South Africa. "Yes," he said upon his return when Elton persuaded him that after such a ferocious public hammering, Taylor needed, more than anything, "a bit of love".

And so it proved. Because that rarefied emotion is apparent in every word, gesture, letter, he has received from Watford supporters since his retirement was announced. "It has brought home to me just how much I have affected peoples' lives," he said, still staring round Vicarage Road, remembering where the old greyhound track used to run, inhaling great lung-fulls of the past to see him through the new course of his future.

The media, ironically, is his new destiny, following father Tom who was a sports writer for the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph. Television certainly beckons, rumour strengthened by the sight of him leaving the ITV offices in London on Thursday, smiling.

What Watford were for under Graham Taylor was always utterly and totally transparent. They were for family, belonging, closeness, community and Taylor is publicly far from happy that Kenny Jackett and Luther Blissett (26 years at the club between them) have been sacked already.

"I don't blame Luca. I blame the board. What's upset me is that they've laid down. If Luca had said he wouldn't come to Watford if he couldn't have immediately brought in his own people, the board should have said 'tough, we'll get somebody else'. You lose your heart and soul of a club like this at your peril."

It is typical he should go out stating honest, earnest opinions, heedless of counter-flak and self-preservation. This is the man, after all, who once sang: "Ee Ay Adio, we've got a point," to the Match of the Day cameras after a particularly dizzy spell of losses came to an end with a draw against Sheffield Wednesday.

They have produced a 72-page tribute magazine to Graham Taylor in Watford which finishes like this: There's no way to say how we really feel. There's only our absolute sincerity and heartfelt gratitude and love and the comforting knowledge that, now as ever, he understands. Thank you Graham. (Right, anyone got a hanky?)